The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War (37 page)

Squaring his shoulders, Burns launched himself back into the fray. “How Mr. Burns was to get through the crowd and overtake the carriage I could not see, nor how he would again break the ranks of the police I could not tell,” Pinkerton admitted, “but he left me and with superhuman strength I saw him go through the crowd like nothing, and bursting through the ranks of the police again reach the carriage. In a few minutes he returned and said that Mr. Judd would see me immediately at the St. Louis.” Pinkerton nodded his approval, though the young messenger’s heroics could not have eased his concerns about what lay ahead. If Burns could so readily reach Lincoln’s side with a message, surely an assassin would be able to reach him with a knife.

As Lincoln’s procession continued on to the Continental, Pinkerton returned to his room at the St. Louis and lit a fire. Samuel Felton arrived shortly afterward, but it was already 6:45 by the time Norman Judd managed to pull free and make his way to Pinkerton’s room. Pinkerton, anxious about the hour, hastily introduced Judd to Felton and hurried both men into chairs by the fire. Felton would recall that he and Pinkerton were both so eager to get down to business that they began speaking at once: “We lost no time in making known to him all the facts which had come to our knowledge in reference to the conspiracy.”

Judd listened attentively as Pinkerton elaborated on details that he had only hinted at in his earlier messages. The detective, looking to make his case in the most effective manner possible, took care to emphasize that the plot against Lincoln had come as a surprise to him. He had gone to Baltimore, he said, with no other purpose in mind than the protection of Felton’s railroad. Only in the course of pursuing that investigation had he “discovered the fact that some persons meditated the assassination of the President Elect.” Felton, meanwhile, confirmed that corroborating information had come to him from other sources, and he insisted that he had no doubt that “there would be blood-shed in Baltimore” if Lincoln adhered to his published itinerary. At the same time, Pinkerton was careful not to exaggerate the scope of the threat. Again and again, he stressed that “a few resolute men” scattered through the crowd in Baltimore would be sufficient to precipitate a disaster. He asked Judd to imagine the likely consequences if Lincoln’s party were to be “hemmed in” by the crowd and surrounded by “a small number of men acting in concert.” It had been difficult enough, at the earlier stops on the itinerary, to get Lincoln safely through. In Buffalo, amid a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, the chaos had been so great “as to seriously injure Major Hunter.” If the Baltimore crowd sheltered men who were bound and determined to strike Lincoln down, “even if they had to give a life for a life,” it would be all but impossible to stop them.

Pinkerton spoke at length about such secessionists as Otis K. Hillard, “whose every sympathy was with the South and would deem it an honor to become martyrs in their cause.” Though it was tempting, Pinkerton admitted, to dismiss Hillard and his kind as toothless firebrands, the same might also have been said of the abolitionist John Brown, “who almost single-handed threw himself into a fight against the nation.” The men in Baltimore, Pinkerton insisted, were no less devoted to their cause. Hillard and his kind would do whatever their leaders called upon them to do, “without asking a why or wherefore,” to guarantee “that Lincoln should not pass through Baltimore alive.”

Adding to his fears, Pinkerton explained, was the fact that he did not expect the Baltimore police to provide effective protection, based on the remarks he had overheard Marshall Kane make. Even if Kane’s men were to “make a decent show to preserve order,” Pinkerton reasoned, it would not be enough. A single determined individual might yet thwart their efforts, as George H. Burns had demonstrated that very afternoon. Pinkerton also had blunt words about the inadequacies of Lincoln’s own arrangements. He asked pointedly what was known of William S. Wood, who had seemingly appeared from nowhere to assume complete control of Lincoln’s movements. Judd admitted that he knew nothing at all of Wood’s background or credentials, and that he had raised much the same questions with Lincoln himself.

Pinkerton concluded that, “as things stood now,” the prospects for a safe passage through Baltimore were bleak. He earnestly believed that he himself—“nameless and unknown as I was”—would stand a better chance in similar circumstances. “I at least had some of my own men with me,” he said, “who would die in their boots before I should be injured.” Ellsworth, Lamon, and the others—well-intentioned as they might be—were simply not prepared for what awaited them. In Pinkerton’s view, Lincoln would be reasonably safe while still on board the train, but from the moment he landed at the Baltimore depot, and especially while riding in the open carriage through the streets, he would be in mortal peril. “I do not believe,” he told Judd, “it is possible he or his personal friends could pass through Baltimore in that style alive.”

“More than an hour was occupied in going over the proofs,” Pinkerton said. During this time Judd said very little. Occasionally, he broke in to ask a question or seek clarification of a detail, but for the most part he sat and stared into the fireplace, stroking his beard and puffing intently at a cigar. At last, when Pinkerton had finished speaking, Judd turned to him with an expression of utter resolve. He was “fully convinced that the plot was a reality,” he said. The question now was what to do next.

This was the moment for which Pinkerton had been planning all day. “My advice,” he told Judd, “is that Mr. Lincoln shall proceed to Washington this evening by the eleven o’clock train.” Judd made to object, but Pinkerton held up a hand for silence. He went on to explain that if Lincoln altered his schedule in this manner, he would be able to slip through Baltimore unnoticed, before the assassins made their final preparations. “This could be done in safety,” Pinkerton said. In fact, it was the only way.

Judd’s face darkened. “I fear very much that Mr. Lincoln will not accede to this,” he said. He explained that although he himself was “deeply impressed with the danger which surrounded Mr. Lincoln,” he doubted that the president-elect would be willing to change his plans in any way. “Mr. Judd said that Mr. Lincoln’s confidence in the people was unbounded,” Pinkerton recalled, “and that he did not fear any violent outbreak; that he hoped by his management and conciliatory measures to bring the secessionists back to their allegiance.”

Though Judd did not say so, there was an additional reason for sticking to the published schedule. Lincoln had less than two days left on his meticulously planned itinerary, and those final hours were packed with emotional resonance. George Washington’s birthday would be celebrated the following day, and Lincoln planned to mark the occasion with a flag raising at Independence Hall, followed by a hectic dogleg journey to Harrisburg to address the state legislature. He had traveled many miles out of his way to make these two important stops, having missed no opportunity throughout the journey to emphasize the symbols and traditions of the presidency. At that very moment, even as Judd sat talking with Pinkerton and Felton, Lincoln was giving one of his characteristic addresses from the balcony of the Continental Hotel, seizing on the historic totems of Philadelphia as he promised to “listen to those breathings rising within the consecrated walls” where the Constitution and Declaration of Independence had originally been framed. Lincoln would not abandon Philadelphia easily.

In Judd’s view, the best chance of getting Lincoln to change his mind rested with Pinkerton himself. He didn’t think it likely that Lincoln would yield, he said, “but as the President is an old acquaintance and friend of yours, and has had occasion before this to test your reliability and prudence, suppose you accompany me to the Continental Hotel in person and abide by his decision?”

There is nothing in Pinkerton’s reports to suggest that he expected to take his concerns directly to Lincoln, nor is it likely, given his long-established passion for secrecy, that he welcomed the prospect. He had made a career of operating in the shadows, always taking care to disguise his appearance, identity, and methods. Worse yet, he had launched the Baltimore operation with a pointed declaration that he would not “consider it safe for myself or my operatives were the fact of my operating known to any politician—no matter of what school, or what position.” Now, with time running short, he would have to break cover and plead his case to the nation’s leading politician, together with his many advisers. Though Judd insisted that Pinkerton’s involvement would remain a closely guarded secret—“whatever the consequences might be”—the detective knew that this would be a difficult promise to keep. Looking back on that night a few years later, Pinkerton was characteristically terse about the decision: “After a long conversation and discussion, Mr. Judd desired that I should go to the Continental Hotel with him and have an interview with Mr. Lincoln. We did so.”

It was now almost 9:00
P.M.
If they were going to get Lincoln on a train that night, they had barely two hours in which to act.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

AN ASSAULT OF SOME KIND

Only begirt with a mighty army or disguised like a fugitive felon or spy, could the elected Chief Magistrate of Thirty Millions of Freemen pass through eight or ten of the States which he has been chosen to lead.

—HORACE GREELEY in the
New York Independent,
February 21, 1861

ALLAN PINKERTON, A VETERAN
of the Newport Rising in his native Britain, had never seen a mob like the one that surrounded the Continental Hotel that evening. “A dense crowd of people filled Chestnut Street,” he wrote, “every square inch of ground was occupied.” For a few moments, he and Judd attempted to force their way through the jam at the front doors. When this proved fruitless, Pinkerton took Judd around the corner to the servant’s entrance on Sansom Street. Even then, it was only with “the utmost difficulty that we were able to get into the building.”

Pinkerton hoped to complete the final details of his plan before meeting with Lincoln. Leaving Judd at the hotel, Pinkerton pushed his way back out onto the street to make additional arrangements, a task made inordinately difficult by the “denseness of the crowd.” Returning a few minutes later, he dived into the throng once more and caught sight of Lincoln in the midst of one of his handshaking levees on the second floor, which had produced a tidal surge of people moving through the hotel. “The interior of the house was as densely crowded as was the outside,” Pinkerton wrote, “and I found that all were ‘getting up stairs.’ When I reached the last of the stairs I found that Mr. Lincoln was in a balcony at the head of the first landing, bowing to the people as they passed up the stairs. There was no way for me to get up but to go into the jam and go up with the human tide, so I went in—but
such
a jam.”

Carried along with the flow, Pinkerton came within sight of Lincoln as the receiving line churned through the hallway and down a second set of stairs. “The people were kept moving in a steady stream around through a double file of police to the stairway on Tenth Street, and thus out,” Pinkerton noted. For a few moments, it looked as if Pinkerton himself would be swept back out onto the street, but after a brief struggle, the detective managed to break free of the current. “I managed to get outside of the file of police and soon found Mr. Judd’s room, where I found him waiting for me,” the detective said. Judd promised that he would send Lincoln a note, asking him to join them as soon as he had finished with the receiving line.

While waiting, Pinkerton continued to lay his plans. He sent messengers to place officers of the telegraph companies on alert. He also arranged for the Adams Express Company to bulk up the security on its runs in and out of Baltimore. Should an attack on Lincoln occur, Pinkerton reasoned, professional thieves might seize on the resulting scenes of confusion “with a view to plunder.” As he made these arrangements, however, Pinkerton had to be cautious of giving out too much information. He asked his contacts at Adams Express to give no explanation of the extra measures to Samuel Shoemaker, their representative in Baltimore. It was not that he doubted Shoemaker’s honesty or loyalty, Pinkerton explained, “but that I feared his discretion.” Even as he took these precautions, Pinkerton kept an anxious eye on the clock. As the hour of ten passed, his hopes of getting Lincoln on a train that night were fading. He considered asking Samuel Felton to provide a special train, but feared that this would make the change of plan far too conspicuous, even if it could be managed in time.

Finally, at 10:15, Pinkerton got word that Lincoln had retired for the evening. Judd dashed off a note, asking the president-elect to come to his room “so soon as convenient on private business of importance.” Pinkerton himself carried the message to Lincoln’s room, but he was prevented from delivering it by Colonel Ellsworth, who stood guard at the door. After what one imagines to have been a heated discussion, Pinkerton dragged the young colonel to see Judd, who “at once ordered Ellsworth to deliver the note.” Ten minutes later, Ellsworth took up his post outside Judd’s room as Lincoln himself ducked through the doorway.

At the sight of Lincoln, Judd hurried forward to make the necessary introductions. According to Pinkerton, however, Lincoln waved the formalities aside. He “at once recollected me” from the days when both men had given service to the Illinois Central Railroad, Pinkerton said, and—“as usual”—had a kind word of greeting for his old acquaintance. “Lincoln liked Pinkerton,” Judd observed, and “had the utmost confidence in him as a gentleman—and a man of sagacity.” For his part, Pinkerton noted that Lincoln appeared “rather exhausted from the fatigues of travel and receptions.”

After showing the president-elect to a chair, Judd began to speak, briefly outlining the circumstances that had sent Pinkerton to Baltimore. “Whilst Mr. Judd was talking,” Pinkerton noted, “Mr. Lincoln listened very attentively, but did not say a word, nor did his countenance, which I watched very closely, show any emotion. He appeared thoughtful and serious, but decidedly firm.”